There’s a strange bit of symmetry in the news that Prateek Kuhad is stepping in front of a camera for the first time. Back in 2018, his breakout music video “cold/mess” ended with its two leads locked in an embrace as they sank underwater, love curdling into something closer to drowning by the final frame. That video helped turn Kuhad from a Jaipur singer-songwriter into a name people outside India started paying attention to — it later turned up, uncredited, in an episode of Ted Lasso. Now, years later, Kuhad is making his feature film acting debut in a movie literally called Drowning. Whether that’s a deliberate echo or just a coincidence nobody’s confirmed yet, it’s hard not to notice.
What is confirmed: Drowning is being produced by Marginal MediaWorks, D36, and Jugaad, and directed by Dar Gai — the same filmmaker who directed “cold/mess” back in 2018. That detail matters more than it might look. Dar Gai isn’t just a director Kuhad happens to be working with again; she’s the person who arguably shaped how audiences first saw him on screen at all, well before this was ever a question of acting. Jugaad, one of the three production companies behind the film, is also her own studio, a Mumbai-based outfit she founded that handles feature films, TV, commercials, and music videos. In other words, this isn’t two strangers meeting on set. It’s a long-running creative partnership finally trying something neither of them had done together before.
Kuhad’s relationship with film sets isn’t new, exactly — it’s just always stayed on the music side of the camera. He’s written lyrics, composed, and lent his voice as a playback singer to a run of Hindi films and series, including Karwaan, Baar Baar Dekho, Dhamaka, Ajeeb Daastaans, Lust Stories, and Gurgaon. His songs have soundtracked other people’s stories for close to a decade. Drowning flips that arrangement: for the first time, he’s the one being directed on screen, rather than the one whose track plays underneath someone else’s scene.
That career arc is part of what makes this debut worth watching rather than just noting in passing. Kuhad built his following the slow way — a self-titled 2013 EP, a Hindi EP called Raat Raazi, then the 2015 album In Tokens and Charms that turned him into one of the most-streamed independent artists coming out of India. He studied math and economics at NYU before turning down whatever path that degree was supposed to lead to, choosing full-time music instead. Somewhere in the years since, “one of the country’s leading singer-songwriters,” as Rolling Stone India once put it, became less a compliment and more just an accurate job description.
What isn’t confirmed yet is almost everything else — who Kuhad plays, who’s starring alongside him, when Drowning shoots or releases, or what the story actually is. Those details haven’t been made public. What’s clear is that a director who already knows how to put Kuhad in front of a lens, and an artist who’s spent a decade making other people’s films sound better, are trying something new together. Given how the last collaboration went, that’s a reasonable enough reason to pay attention.
